Dear Mr. Leopold: Hello, my name is Anna Wood, and I am a student athlete at Mosinee High School. I have participated in gymnastics for fourteen years, and I have been a varsity athlete on the Mosinee High School Gymnastics team for three years. Previously, I competed competitively at the YMCA. Through my experiences, I distinctly see that the Mosinee Gymnastics Program encounters numerous disadvantages because of how practices are run and the lack of access to a spring floor. The Mosinee Gymnastics Team regularly sets up equipment, specifically the spring floor, in order to promote safety, boost mental health, and fully develop the potential of athletes. First, the safety of athletes is in jeopardy because of lifting bulky equipment, and …show more content…
Last year, the lowest GPA of gymnasts was 3.4. According to Indeed, a website dedicated to assisting people to find their career path, the average GPA in the United States is a 3.0. When comparing these statistics, it is clear that student athletes in the Mosinee Gymnastics Program value their education. Homework and study are essential to reaching a 3.4 GPA or above. Therefore, it is inferred that when athletes get home from long practices, they spend time doing homework and studying. So when looking at these students’ schedules, they are at school for 7.5 hours, practicing for 3 hours, and doing homework for 1.5 hours. In total, students spend 12 hours dedicated to school and sports. According to John Hopkins Medicine, a top-notch research university, a teenager should acquire 9 to 9.5 hours of sleep every night. Utilizing this information, the total 12 hours of school and sports plus the 9.5 hours of sleep only leaves 2.5 hours left in these students’ day. These students are still kids, and in this stage of life they need to be with friends, work, and experience new adventures, but how can they do this if they only have a short 2.5 hours a day for themselves? As a result, students take time out of their sleep schedule to accommodate their social life. According to Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, sleep deprivation results in …show more content…
Without the spring floor, gymnasts cannot excel. This affects two of the four events in gymnastics: floor and beam. The spring floor allows gymnasts to perfect and advance skills, which directly results in higher scores at competitions. On top of that, a new skill on the balance beam is rare, for a spring floor is where the skill starts in an adolescent phase and it progresses to the beam only when it is flawlessly performed on the floor.Therefore, the potential of these athletes cannot be reached because the gymnasts rarely get to practice on the spring floor. Coach Kris Schlei, an astonishing gymnastics coach of 31 years, gave this statement when asked how the scarcity of the spring floor affects our overall scores at competitions. “Gymnasts that are practicing without the spring floor are like basketball athletes practicing with a flat basketball. We are without a doubt not at our full potential without a spring floor because we cannot perfect skills or learn harder ones.” Through this credible source, it is proven that without the correct equipment, the Mosinee Gymnastics Program will hardly improve. If we were to imagine Coach Schlei’s comparison of a basketball team practicing with a flat basketball, it is evident that the poorly equipped team would be defeated in any game they attend. That is exactly what is happening to the Mosinee Gymnastics Program. Without the